Skin-baring might bring ticket, arrest

MYRTLE BEACH — Myrtle Beach leaders are considering a tougher indecent exposure law that would allow officers to issue tickets or make arrests the first time they see someone baring too much skin.

The Sun News of Myrtle Beach reports that the current so-called “thong ordinance” requires officers to issue a warning before issuing tickets. Myrtle Beach has banned thongs on the beach for 16 years.

City spokesman Mark Kruea says the tougher law is not in response to May motorcycle rallies along the Grand Strand, although he acknowledges the biker events bring an increase in illegally exposed skin.

The Myrtle Beach City Council will consider the new rules for the first time today.

Myrtle Beach Asks Atlantic Beach for Biker Ban

Atlantic Beach, SC - (AP) — Officials from Myrtle Beach want their counterparts in nearby Atlantic Beach to join them in getting rid of motorcycle rallies.

The Sun News of Myrtle Beach reports that leaders in Atlantic Beach say the annual rally that attracts black motorcyclists makes money for the town.

Councilman Donnell Thompson says he would consider banning the rally if Myrtle Beach helped his town with its financial problems.

Myrtle Beach passed 15 laws last year designed to get rid of two May motorcycle rallies — the Harley-Davidson spring rally that attracts mostly white riders, and the Atlantic Beach Bikefest.

Myrtle Beach City Manager Tom Leath detailed the new laws at the meeting, and said it is time to regain control of the Grand Strand.

S.C. becomes focal point to track funds for gangs, narcotics

South Carolina’s political and military leaders fear that U.S. street gangs are conspiring with international terrorists, an alarming scenario they said highlights the need for a specialized unit that targets major drug runners and their bankrollers.

And they want the South Carolina National Guard to run the federally-funded pilot program.

U.S. Reps. Joe Wilson and Henry Brown, both Republicans, have asked U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates to back the creation of a military unit that would bridge a perceived security gap between the international drug trade and the war on terror.

“The National Guard has the capacity and the authority to play a unique role in our nation’s counter-narcotics mission,” Wilson told The Post and Courier. “The counter-narcotics pilot program would specifically target the illicit finance generated by the narcotics industry here at home and abroad which is used to fund terrorist operations around the world.”

Proponents said a successful program in South Carolina could serve as a national model and that several factors make the state a strategic location to set up shop:

–The state boasts an abundance of major military installations and resources that already serve key national security roles, including Charleston Air Force Base and its fleet of C-17s, Charleston’s port and the Navy brig, which has housed terrorism suspects.

–Organized gangs with international ties already are operating in the state. One of these organizations, the notorious Mara Salvatrucha-13 (MS-13), has possible links to hostile groups in Afghanistan and the Middle East, according to Wilson and Brown.

–Wilson cites a new report by the Congressional Research Service on the emerging international threat posed by the MS-13 and 18th Street gangs. The report states that “alarms have been sounded in some circles that international terrorist organizations such as al-Qaeda could exploit alien and narcotics smuggling networks controlled by these gangs to infiltrate the United States.”

–The state National Guard already is working in some counter-narcotics programs, and its citizen soldiers are accustomed to collaborating in drug investigations with state and local law enforcement.

But questions remain. Among them: How strong is the evidence linking terrorists, gangs and drug-trafficking? How would this new program square with existing federal, state and local drug enforcement efforts? And is South Carolina the best place for this mission?

The gang connection

Gang activity in South Carolina has increased steadily over the past decade as these criminal organizations have spilled from urban centers into rural and suburban nooks across the nation in search of new territory and customers.

In 2004, the state Law Enforcement Division had identified 84 groups in South Carolina that fit a general definition of a gang: an organized group of five or more people who adopt a common name and engage in crime. By 2007, that figure had ballooned to 325 identified gangs, authorities said.

The number of crimes attributed to gangs has mushroomed as well. In 2007, gangs were linked to more than 950 crimes in South Carolina, including drug trafficking. By comparison, 370 gang-related crimes were reported statewide in 2001, according to SLED.

Many of these groups are what police describe as “hybrid gangs,” small, independent groups connected by turf or friendship. But highly organized gangs with cross-border connections also are present — gangs such as MS-13, Surenos, 18th Street and the Mexican Mafia.

“The number of Hispanic gangs is drastically growing,” said Special Agent Nicole Bryan, SLED’s coordinator on gangs in the Midlands. “As the Hispanic community has grown, Hispanic gangs have increased as part of that growth.”

Across the country, MS-13 and other gangs increasingly have become involved in narcotic trafficking at the wholesale level. They’ve cultivated connections with Mexican drug cartels and other power criminal organizations to gain access to international suppliers and large- volume shipments, according to the National Drug Intelligence Center. These affiliations have increased the availability of illegal drugs and the profits flowing out of the country.

The revenue stream is huge, with traffickers employing myriad of methods to launder and smuggle drug money to foreign destinations. The drug intelligence center estimates that Mexican and Colombian drug traffickers generate and launder as much as $39 billion in wholesale profits annually, much of which is smuggled out of the United States along the Mexican border.

Over the years, South Carolina has emerged as a key distribution point in this narcotics pipeline, serving as a smuggling route for drugs from California, Florida, Georgia, New York, Texas and Mexico. South Carolina’s location along Interstates 95 and 85, between New York and Florida, makes it ideal for drug runners shipping marijuana, cocaine, methamphetamine and heroin along the Eastern Seaboard, according to the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration.

“Project 9496″

The pilot program would target this stealthy underworld of drugs and money. The new unit is shrouded in secrecy, with scant details of its origin, funding and status. The Pentagon refers to the program as “Project 9496.”

Col. Pete Brooks, director of public affairs for the S.C. National Guard, said it’s too early to talk about the effort in detail. “We are not even out of the blocks yet. This whole new mission is at the ‘good idea’ stage and is not funded.”

But a Jan. 14 letter from Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense Richard J. Douglas to the National Guard Bureau indicates the pilot program already is approved. The letter states that the South Carolina Counter Narco-Terrorism Pilot Program is to be run and funded separately from an existing network of states’ National Guard counter-drug units.

Brooks said the pilot program would expand the South Carolina Guard’s anti-drug unit, which employs 40 full-time employees and hires about a dozen temporary workers each summer to help destroy marijuana crops.

The program receives about $1.6 million in federal money each year in support of the drug eradication efforts of SLED and local police agencies. How the two agencies would partner under the pilot program is unclear because SLED considers it only “an idea at this point,” according to a statement the agency issued in response to questions from the newspaper. Exactly how much the program would cost also remains unclear.

The letters of support from Brown and Wilson suggest that Gov. Mark Sanford also is pushing for the new mission. But Sanford’s press secretary, Joel Sawyer, said the governor was unaware of the proposal until The Post and Courier inquired about it.

After discussing the plans with state Guard officials, however, Sanford thinks the program is “an intriguing idea,” Sawyer said.

Still, the program’s status and future remains unclear. The National Guard Bureau said federal seed money was set aside only to study the program’s feasibility. The agency couldn’t provide a figure.

Tracking the money

Efforts to choke off terrorist financing began in earnest after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, with then President George W. Bush announcing two weeks later a “major thrust of our war on terrorism … a strike on the financial foundation of the global terror network.”

Within months, the U.S. government froze the assets of dozens of alleged terrorists, banks and nonprofit groups.

Investigators learned that al-Qaida financiers used everything from electronic transfers to camels to move money and fund their operations. Making matters even more challenging was the existence of the hawala system, a centuries-old money loan and transfer system that is based on the honor system among brokers across the world.

Unlike traditional banking systems, which leave trails of paper and records, hawalas typically don’t keep records of individual transactions.

But financing experts and government officials have said tracking down terrorism financiers has suffered in recent years. A report last year by the Paris-based Financial Action Task Force said international efforts have had limited success and that the United States and other countries need to create new counter-terrorism techniques.

Reports by the Government Accountability Office in the past two years have said the nation needs an “integrated strategy to coordinate the delivery of counter-terrorism financing training.” A Pentagon report in 2007 called for “one over-arching organization” devoted to international terrorism financing.

John Cassara, a former CIA officer and U.S. Treasury Department agent, said the military in recent years has become more focused on narco-terrorists and their paymasters. He said that this emphasis is a natural outgrowth of the military’s efforts in Afghanistan, where most of the world’s opium is produced.

“We’ve seen over the years how the Taliban has used it to bankroll their operations,” said Cassara, author of “Hide & Seek - Intelligence, Law Enforcement and the Stalled War on Terror Finance.” “The classic line is that if you take away the money, there’s no terrorism. The military realizes this.”

But Cassara said he hasn’t seen any solid evidence showing connections between Latin American gangs and Central Asian and Middle Eastern terrorism. “Could it happen? Absolutely. Does it happen? Frankly I don’t know,” he said, adding that organized criminal gangs are “opportunists, and they will naturally reach out to organizations that can facilitate their operations.”

A recent assessment from the National Drug Intelligence Center reached a similar conclusion, saying such connections are possible but not supported by evidence. The report identified U.S. prison gangs that have spread outside the bars as having the most potential for relationships with terrorists.

While government officials know of no concrete connection between gangs selling drugs in the United States and Middle East terrorist groups, authorities have long known that terrorist organizations in South America, especially in Colombia, fuel much of their activity with drug money. And authorities say they have watched with growing concern as Nigerian criminal groups increasingly have brought drugs, some of it from the Middle East, into this country, including the Southeast.

Source: CORDIS

Since 9/11, the need to secure important facilities from terrorist attack has become a top priority around the world. And one of the keys to this is making sure the right people are allowed into sensitive areas and the wrong people are kept out.

A range of technologies and systems have been deployed in the past few years, but the more successful they are the more obtrusive they tend to be, causing disruptions and delays.

For the past three years, a consortium of academic and research institutions and private-sector companies have been looking at developing new technologies that aim at enhancing both security and safety across a wide spectrum of applications.

At the same time, they have been improving existing technologies with the aim of making recognition techniques much more unobtrusive.

Combining biometrics and sensors

At the heart of the EU-funded HUMABIO research project is combining new types of biometrics – methods used for the unique recognition of humans – with the latest sensor technologies.

As well as developing sensorial and connectivity hardware for specific biometric applications, the researchers had to come up with sophisticated new software to extract the biometric profile of individuals, based on physiology and behaviour characteristics. This is stored in a database and then compared to profiles created when individuals enter the monitored area.

Until now, the most widely used forms of biometric identification have been fingerprints, facial recognition and voice recognition, all of which can be faked. HUMABIO has introduced new forms of biometric recognition which are considerably more difficult to get around.

Headgear scans brainwaves

Uniquely, this includes using electrocardiograms (ECGs), which record heart rhythms, and electroencephalograms (EEGs), which record brain patterns, to identify people. The researchers have come up with prototype headgear which includes two electrodes to take the readings.

Unlike some of the other achievements of the project, this technology is still at pre-commercial, proof-of-concept stage and might take several years before becoming widely used.

“Unobtrusiveness was one of the most important aspects of what we were trying to achieve,” says project coordinator Dimitrios Tzovaras, “but a lot of work will need to be done on the EEG and ECG sensors to make them unobtrusive”.

The project is delighted with the results to date, however, and Tzovaras says: “This is the first time this type of biometrics has been used for identification, and it solves most of the problems other biometric systems face.”

Other new types of biometrics the project has been working on are much closer to commercialisation. These include analysis of gait, or the way people walk and carry themselves, and analysis of seated posture. The project has also been enhancing facial and voice recognition techniques, and putting everything together into a multimodal biometric identification system which is more secure than the unimodal biometrics that comprise it.

Successful pilot projects

The new technologies developed by HUMABIO were tested in three pilot projects. The first was in a truck provided by one of the project’s industrial partners, Volvo. It combined facial and voice recognition with posture recognition via a seat cover fitted with a new type of inbuilt sensor for analysing how the driver sits. The system continually updates the driver’s biometric information both to warn if there is a change of driver, possibly following a hijack, and to make sure the driver is fit to drive.

A second pilot was at the Euroairport in Basel, with voice, facial recognition and gait recognition being used to provide on-the-go authentication of airport personnel, such as security guards and airline pilots. The third demonstration, in a laboratory at Stuttgart, used biometric authentication to restrict access to a specific, high-value machine which can only be used by trained, authorised personnel.

“In the first pilot, the seat cover was as comfortable as a normal [one], and the facial and voice sensors did not bother the driver at all. In the other two pilots, people at the airport and lab were able to move around freely in the monitored areas while their identities were authenticated. The goal of unobtrusiveness was attained, while security and safety was considerably enhanced compared to conventional systems,” says Tzovaras.

The truck pilot was so successful that Volvo is now planning to install the authentication system on all its trucks, and other parts of the system, such as the enhanced facial recognition camera, are also on the way to being commercialsed.

While work is still needed on some of the technologies, there are working prototypes for all of them including EGC/EEG, which Tzovaras believes will one day be integrated into sophisticated biometric systems that terrorists and criminals will find it next to impossible to fool.

HUMABIO is funded under the ICT strand of the Sixth Framework Programme for research.

Source: IPS

NEW YORK - In what promises to be the first major test of the Barack Obama administration’s new approach to the rule of law, the Supreme Court will soon hear what could be one of the most consequential cases in U.S. history.

It will be asked to answer the question: Can a U.S. president declare a legal resident an ‘enemy combatant’ and hold him or her indefinitely without charge or trial?

The legal U.S. resident in question is Ali Saleh Kahlah al-Marri, who has been detained in solitary confinement at a Navy brig in South Carolina since June 2003. Al-Marri is the only remaining person held in the United States as an “enemy combatant”. He is being represented by lawyers from the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).

The case, Al-Marri v. Spagone, is a habeas corpus action, challenging al-Marri’s indefinite detention. The defendant is Navy Commander Daniel Spagone, who runs the Navy brig in South Carolina where Al-Marri is being held by the military.

The central pre-Supreme Court question is what position the new Obama administration will take when it files its brief, currently due on Mar. 23. The Supreme Court will hear oral arguments during the last week of April and is expected to hand down its ruling in June. The brief filed by the government in the lower courts during the George W. Bush administration defended the president’s authority to designate “enemy combatants” and to detain them indefinitely.

The ACLU says that the Al-Marri case “provides the Obama administration with an early and critical opportunity to repudiate the abuses of the past eight years and restore the rule of law.”

Jonathan Hafetz, ACLU’s lead attorney on the Al-Marri case, told IPS, “This is one of most extreme examples of the Bush administration’s abuse of executive power. It is a case where President Bush sought to push the outer limits of the Constitution. It is legally and morally indefensible.”

A separate case, Al-Marri v. Gates, is contesting al-Marri’s abusive treatment and conditions of confinement at the Navy brig.

Al-Marri, a Qatari national, came lawfully to the United States in September 2001with his wife and five children to pursue a master’s degree at Bradley University in Peoria, Illinois. He was arrested by the FBI at his home that December and subsequently indicted for credit card fraud and false identification.

Al-Marri asserted his innocence and prepared to contest the charges. But on Jun. 23, 2003, on the eve of a hearing to suppress illegally seized evidence and less than a month before trial, President Bush declared al-Marri an al Qaeda agent and designated him an “enemy combatant” in the “war on terrorism”. That same day, the military took custody of al-Marri and incarcerated him in the Navy brig, where he has been detained without charge ever since.

At stake in Al-Marri v. Spagone is whether the president can order the military to seize and detain indefinitely, without charge or trial, individuals lawfully residing in the United States, including U.S. citizens, based on government assertions that they planned to commit terrorist activities.

In 2007, a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit ruled that the government cannot hold individuals arrested in this country in military detention without charge.

But in July 2008, the full U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit ruled in a narrowly divided decision that the president had legal authority to imprison al-Marri indefinitely without charge based on the facts alleged. As one judge noted in dissent, however, to accept the government’s claim of extraordinary detention power would have “disastrous consequences for the Constitution - and the country”.

The ACLU says Al-Marri’s detention represents “one of the gravest expansions of executive detention power since Sep. 11.” The United States was founded on the principle that “individuals living in this country cannot be imprisoned without charge and that civilian government must remain supreme over the military. Al-Marri’s detention represents a radical departure from that celebrated legal tradition - one that was never authorised by Congress and that violates the Constitution.”

According to the ACLU, documents recently obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request reveal that standard operating procedures developed for Guantánamo Bay “were secretly applied at the Navy brig in an effort to create a prison beyond the law within the United States. Today, al-Marri remains in virtual isolation at the Brig, denied even meaningful communication with his family.”

“It is clearly illegal to imprison legal residents of the United States without trial. It is also the type of false choice between our safety and our ideals that has pervaded America’s approach to fighting terrorism for the past eight years,” said the ACLU’S Hafetz. “We are confident that upon review, the Court will strike down this radical departure from our nation’s most basic values and traditions.”

Former United States Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach, former FBI Director William Sessions and numerous former generals, admirals and diplomats joined the ACLU in urging the U.S. Supreme Court to reject the president’s authority to indefinitely imprison a legal resident of the U.S. without charge or trial. These and other top military and civilian leaders have filed friend-of-the-court briefs.

“A decision upholding our government’s right to arrest and imprison anyone within its borders, without charge, will not only undercut our ability to convince dictatorial regimes to abandon similar practices, it will substantially undermine efforts to restore our international reputation and to obtain more cooperation from our allies in combating terrorism,” they said in the brief.

The second Al-Marri case, Al-Marri v. Gates, contests al-Marri’s treatment and conditions of confinement since he was declared an “enemy combatant”. During the first 16 months of his military confinement, al-Marri was held incommunicado and subjected to a range of highly coercive interrogation measures, including being held in total isolation, exposed to painful stress positions, shackled in a freezing cell for hours at a time, and threatened with violence and death.

Al-Marri is the second U.S. person to have been held as an enemy combatant within the United States. The first was José Padilla, a United States citizen. Padilla was arrested in Chicago in May 2002, and was detained as a material witness until Jun. 9 2002, when President Bush designated him an illegal enemy combatant and transferred him to a military prison, arguing that he was thereby not entitled to trial in civilian courts.

Padilla was held for three-and-a-half years as an “enemy combatant” after his arrest on suspicion of plotting a radioactive “dirty bomb” attack. That charge was dropped when his case was moved to a civilian court after pressure from civil liberties groups.

In August 2007, Padilla was found guilty by a federal jury of charges that he conspired to kill people in an overseas jihad and to fund and support overseas terrorism. He was sentenced to 17 years and four months in prison.

Source: WWLTV

NEW ORLEANS – Residents in and around New Orleans have been hearing the sounds of low-flying helicopters and what sounds like bomb blasts over the past few nights, but the sounds are part of a training exercise for some of America’s elite military troops.

At one Lakefront home, Gigi Burk normally hears her son, 6-year-old Beau, practicing the piano, but last night she heard something much different at around 10 p.m.

“I said, oh my God! They’re bombs. That’s what I thought it was, somebody dropping bombs,” Burk said.

Burk said she panicked, not knowing why she was hearing what sounded like explosions and low-flying helicopters.

“We’re a little skittish around here with things that have happened,” Burk said.

But according to military officials, it’s a training exercise that brought about 150 U.S. troops from the U.S. Special Operations Command to train in New Orleans for urban warfare.

“They are regularly engaged in combat operations,” said U.S. Special Operations Command staffer Kimberly Tiscione. “They are the best of the best we have to offer across all the branches of the military.”

Black Hawk and “Little Bird” helicopters are transporting troops to several locations around New Orleans, according to Tiscione.

“They’re going to be flying near buildings, doing approaches on them,” Tiscione said. “You might see them landing on the roof tops or landing on the ground near them as well.”

“I heard a bunch of explosions starting at about 10 p.m. They were about ten seconds apart, and then they’d stop, and we thought it was over, but then they started again,” said Burk.

Tiscione said that the ground troops were performing “breeches at several different locations.

“So, they’re moving through doorways or walls or that sort of thing. They’re also doing weapons proficiency,” Tiscione said.

The forces are using simulated ammunitions, almost like paintball pellets, to conduct the training. And even though the noise may affect your neighborhood, the night-time training is only supposed to last from sundown to 11 p.m., according to Tiscione.

“They are the best of the best because they get these kind of training events,” she said.

Burk said she wishes the training had been better publicized before-hand to avoid a scare Tuesday night.

“People were talking about it everywhere today,” Burk said.

The NOPD did put a press release out about the training, and WWL-TV aired a story about it; however, that was a week ago.

Since U.S. Special Operations Command hasn’t done a similar training here since 2000, it has caught many people by surprise.

The training will go on every night through the end of this week.

SYNC reduces driving distractions claim

Research carried out by Ford on its SYNC hands-free system claims that it significantly reduces the level of distraction when drivers select a phone number or choose a song on their MP3 player compared with the same operations with hand-held cell phones and music players.

The research claims study participants spent an average of 25 seconds with their eyes-off-the-road to select a song with a handheld MP3 player compared with only two seconds for those choosing a song using SYNC.

Test participants performed seven typical tasks using SYNC’s voice interface and their personal handheld phones and music players. The tasks included dialing a 10-digit number, calling a specific person from the digital phonebook, receiving a call while driving, playing a specific song, and reviewing and responding to text messages. For each task, Ford researchers measured total eyes-off-the-road time, deviation of lane position, speed variability, and object detection response time to identify differences in attentiveness and driving performance while using basic functions.

The research was undertaken in a driving simulator with 25 participants who are regular SYNC users to compare driver performance and eye glance behavior effects of tasks performed using SYNC’s voice interface as compared to using nomadic devices with visual-manual interfaces.

Charleston Leaders Consider a Noise Ordinance
Reporter: Kallie Cart
Email Address: news@wsaz.com

CHARLESTON, W.Va. (WSAZ) — The Capitol City may soon get a lot quieter.

The Charleston City Council introduced a new noise ordinance Monday
night to crack down on loud offenders.

In addition to muffling noises like illegal mufflers on cars and
motorcycles, the new ordinance would also silence big trucks.

It will be illegal for truckers to make that jack hammering noise that
comes when they engine brake.

The ordinance also spells out the violations, making it easier for
police to crack down.

Violations could carry a big price tag of 500-dollars, which some city
council members say is a small price to pay for peace and quiet.

Noises from things like festivals, ballgames, and businesses are exempt
from the ordinance.

The proposal still has to be approved by the city council.